My Original Homebrew Approach

Ever wondered why last.fm don’t provide an RSS feed of your loved tracks*? Me too. So using the freely available audioscrobbler web services i’ve created a very basic last.fm loved tracks feed which. The main reason for doing so was to update twitter with my loved tracks via twitterfeed. The feed can be called with the following syntax:

http://jamazon.co.uk/last.love/user/[last.fm username]/feeds/[feed type (rss|atom|opml)]

It’ll work with any valid last.fm username.

Here’s mine:

http://jamazon.co.uk/last.love/user/jamiethompson/feeds/rss

* last.fm now provide an official RSS feed of loved tracks. If you somehow missed the massive notice at the top of this page, scroll back up and read it.

There are the usual number of pitfalls you’d expect when integrating [insert widely-used microsoft technology here] with [insert useful open source technology here]

Want to consume a JSON Web Service with jQuery? Sounds simple. That’s kinda the point of JSON right? Well yeah, but no. Everything’s workaroundable and to be fair it isn’t all Microsoft’s fault… ok so most of it is.

I’m gonna be starting a large scale ASP.NET / jQuery / ExtJS project in the very near future and Dave’s short guide has probably just saved me several hours if not a whole day of figuring out all the lumps and bumps myself.

The error

imagettfbbox() [function.imagettfbbox]: Could not find/open font

The specified font file existed and was readable. I was in fact testing for this eventuality using is_readable() prior to the the imagettfbbox call. After some poking around and a bit of googling I narrowed the problem down to a bug.. or feature in PHP > 4.3.0

The solution

It’s a simple fix, but what worked for me was to pass imagettfbbox an absolute path to the font. This is with PHP 5.2.0. I’ve read of this working for lots of people using various versions of PHP from 4.3.0 onwards, but it also seems that this isn’t always the solution, so your mileage may vary. As usual, it probably depends on a magic combination of seven million random compile flags.

So to sum up. Using imagettfbbox with relative font paths in PHP >= 4.3.0 may result in an error. A solution seems to be to use absolute paths. If this isn’t the issue, it could be spaces in the filename? Your really shouldn’t put spaces in filenames, what are you a windows user?

Official bug report here: http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=22092

Sometimes* PHP just sucks

* all the time

Prerequisites:

jQuery (obviously!) – grab yourself a fresh copy from http://code.jquery.com/jquery-latest.js

Usage:

$(document).ready(function{
$('#navigation a').accesskeys();
});


Based on an original idea by Lyall Oldfield